The fourth named practicer, George Gilmer, Sr., deserves extended attention. He comes as close as any one person to being a typical Williamsburg apothecary-surgeon-physician of his time, though his extramedical career was far from typical.

Born in Edinburgh in 1700, Gilmer studied medicine there, then practiced with one of London’s leading doctors, whose daughter he married. Possibly the death of his young wife moved him to ship for America; at the age of 31 he arrived in Virginia to practice medicine and manage the affairs of a land company. He married again여성알바 and must have prospered, because in four years’ time he was able to purchase for £155 three choice lots near the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg.

These three lots, on which the rambling St. George Tucker House has stood since 1788, were described in 1735 as “the Lotts and Land whereon the Bowling Green formerly was, the Dwelling House and Kitchen of William Levingston and the House call’d the Play House.” The last, of course, was the first theater in the English colonies, and Gilmer later sold it to the mayor and aldermen of Williamsburg to be used as a city hall and courthouse. It was a particularly convenient arrangement for one of the aldermen who was to become mayor himself a year later, none other than Dr. George Gilmer.

Gilmer’s career as an apothecary-surgeon-physician was not without its ups and downs. Soon after buying the property on Palace Green, he was giving away samples of rattlesnake root on behalf of Dr. John Tennent, who maintained it would cure pleurisy, the gout, rheumatism, and mad-dog bites.

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At the same time the Virginia Gazette, Williamsburg’s new weekly, carried the news that “on Monday Morning last, dy’d, at Mr. Geo. Gilmer’s, in this City, Mrs. Susanna Skaife, ... and was decently interr’d on Wensday. And, on Thursday Morning also dy’d, the Rev. Mr. John Skaife, her Husband, after a tedious Indisposition.” It would appear that at least Mrs. Skaife was a bed patient in Dr. Gilmer’s home; this was a usual way of caring for serious illnesses before the day of hospitals.